Haunted Byersdale

Used by permission of the artist.

by Robert Giles

Some of the old timers who put up their own homes on top of the hill in Byersdale must have built without benefit of plumb or level.

I’m talking about the houses just beyond the water tower where the road straightens out just before the dogleg to the left. They were all jammed in cheek-by-jowl, like row houses. Maybe they held each other up. Or perhaps the thick tangle of woods on the hillside kept them from rolling over backwards into Legionville Hollow.

That row of six or seven houses always seemed to be holding on for dear life.

I may exaggerate. It is one particular pair of houses I remember from fifty years ago. The others suffer from guilt-by-association.

I delivered the morning paper to the occupants of the two houses. The two families were related and shared a single copy of the Post-Gazette.

There were two brothers – one married and one a bachelor. The bachelor lived with his mother. When it came to paying for the paper, I collected from the married brother; but if he and his wife were absent, I was instructed to call on the bachelor.

The bachelor seldom spoke. The mother I saw only once.

In autumn the days shortened. It was dark when I got home from school. I delivered papers in the morning but did bill collection in the evening. Who wants to get out of bed at sunrise to do business with the paperboy?

That stretch of road wasn’t my favorite place. There was one streetlight. If you looked closely you could spy out a bat or two circling the water tower. Beneath my right shoulder were the black depths of the hollow. The pavement was neglected and broken away at the edges.

I shuffled through a cover of fallen leaves. The night air was frosty.

I turned onto a boardwalk that forded the frozen ditch in front of my customer’s front porch. The house sat right on the road. It was just a few feet over the ditch and onto the porch. There was no room for a lawn. The two houses were separated by a gap of twelve inches. The families shared a single porch as well as a single newspaper.

The decking of the porch gave perceptibly with each step. I felt as though I was aboard an old ship that was groaning in a heavy sea. One false step ...

I approached the door. It seemed no one was at home. There was one dim light on, back in the kitchen. I knocked once, then a second time. I waited. No one answered. I walked over to the bachelor’s door.

I knocked at the second door. I knocked again, then a third time, more forcefully. I turned to leave. Just then there was an answering knock – more aptly, a tap, slowly repeating and becoming louder.

I looked into the small window high up on the door. A creature with a thousand legs scurried across the glass.

I peered in. Tap … tap … tap. A figure in black came toward the door. The room was unlit. I could see that the figure held a cane.

Slowly, slowly, slowly towards the door it came. The knob turned. The door opened wide. Before me was an ancient head in a heavy black babushka, its owner clad in widow’s weeds. Someone had dressed for a funeral thirty years before and had never undressed.

The apparition looked at me blankly as it opened its mouth to utter something unintelligible in a foreign tongue.

It was time to screw my courage to the sticking point. Screw courage.  I turned and fled.

The Dead-End Swing

If Roy wasn’t a jagoff he wouldn’t have jumped like he did onto the Tarzan swing beneath the Legionville Bridge.

Couldn't he see there were already two kids holding onto the rope? They were swinging out over the pit under the north end of the bridge. Below them was a whole bunch of broken concrete that some chiseler had left scattered on the ground when he replaced the deck.

There was an open sewer line down there. It always stunk.

We saw that Billy was scared bad. You could tell by the way he clung to Dave’s waist. The rope swung back towards us like a pendulum beneath a cuckoo clock.

Roy landed high up on Dave’s back, missing the rope completely. How did he think Dave was going to hold on? Dave was the strongest kid in the neighborhood but Roy must have weighed two hundred pounds.

What was he thinking? A big fat zero. To think you have to have a brain.

Three kids were taking a ride and only one had a grip on the rope. Something had to give. Roy may have panicked and started to kick. Maybe Billy was trying to grab the rope to help Dave. Anyway, something made Billy lose his grip. He started to slide down between Dave and Roy. Dave tried to grasp him with his legs in a scissors lock to save him, like the way The Flying Wallenda had saved his partner on the high wire.

Dave tried his best but down Billy slid. It all happened in a second though it seemed like forever plus one day. Everything was quiet except for the wheeze of the rope against the steel of the bridge.

Billy grabbed at Dave’s foot but it was bye-bye Billy. He went down like a load of bricks. Luckily Billy missed the concrete - he landed feet first between two huge chunks.

Couldn't those highway contractor bastards pick up after themselves?

Billy’s legs buckled, then his ass hit, then his back and shoulders, finally his head. Everything bounced as it hit the clay.

We looked down. Was Billy dead? What would we tell his mother?

Frieda

We took a shovel and a galvanized steel container down into the woods to dig some topsoil for Dad. “Get some good black earth”, he instructed.

We descended the path that cut across the steep hillside of the hollow. About half way down the ground leveled out, down by the “gold mine”. That was where we were going to dig for dirt.

The “gold mine” was perhaps a stone quarry back when the Harmony Society owned the land. Maybe they dug into the hillside poking around for minerals. Who knows? (Farther up the hollow in Economy Park was a “silver mine”.)

We looked for a spot a good distance from a large tree. We wanted to get twenty gallons of dirt quickly and go home. We didn’t have time to fool with tree roots.

My brother called out, “Over here. Someone may have already loosened the dirt.”

We dug down about two feet, filling our “bucket” with light, friable earth containing lots of naturally composted oak leaves and mast.

Just then the shovel struck something hard. Chuck reached into the hole. He pulled out a skull and a jawbone.

“There’s a whole skeleton down there, he exclaimed. Maybe someone was murdered.”

It was too small to be an adult. Maybe it was a child. The skull was narrow and elongated.

“Why this must be a big dog, like a collie.”

Just then something made us all look up the hillside toward Anthony Wayne Drive. On top of the bluff stood Old Mike, glowering at us through the trees.

“Christ almighty, I think we just dug up Frieda,” Chuck mumbled beneath his breath.

Frieda was Old Mike’s beloved pet.

Six Ghouls in an Olds 88

One evening after dark Mom sent me over to the Isaly store for a half-gallon of milk. When I came out of the store and headed up the alley, a big car pulled up alongside me.

The man at the wheel rolled down the window. There were six men in the car.

I wasn’t savvy enough to know that six men in one car always meant trouble. Still, I got a little nervous.

“Hey kid, is this where the girls are?” the man asked.

“Do you mean in the hotel?” I asked, puzzled at the man’s question.

“Yeah, in the hotel, you know …” The man’s voice trailed off and he began to wink at me. He moved his arm as though giving me a nudge even though I was outside the car and three feet away.

“Yeah, I guess there are ladies in the hotel. I’m not allowed to go in.”

A man in the back seat started to laugh. “Let’s get out of here, the kid’s still a virgin”, he said. They all started to laugh.

When you put your finger on a phonograph record, everything slows down and gets distorted.

“Haw, haw, the kid's stilllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaviiiiiiiiiiiiiiirgin,” someone cackled again as the car pulled away.

I told Mom what had happened when I got home. She turned almost as white as the milk I handed her.

“You stay away from that place, you hear me. Stay out of the alley.”

One thing about moms – they always order you to do the impossible.

Miracle of the Fishes

My brother and I were fishing for catfish down at the old lock wall when we noticed that the water below us was teeming with tiny silver minnows. We put down our rods to make a survey.

The minnows seemed to be coming from the stream that flowed into the “lock” from a tunnel that led back to the swamp that pooled just below the Byers plant.

Those minnows must have taken a shine to swamp water. There were millions of them.

Dave had an idea. “Let’s go home and get Dad’s seine out of his fishing tackle. We’ll get some big plastic buckets too.”

Soon we were back at the river properly equipped with minnow gear.

We waded into the stream. We wore our tennis shoes to protect our feet from glass and metal. 

Our feet sank in the muck. Soon the water was cloudy and we couldn’t see the minnows. We could only feel them bumping into our bare legs, hundreds at a time.

Dave instructed me to go upstream and walk towards him as he held the seine across the run.

All of a sudden he raised his net. There must have been ten pounds of minnows thrashing about inside the seine, their silver sides reflecting the sun. We scooped them into our buckets.

“This is way more fun than catching catfish.”

We sat and made plans to open a bait store. Why pull night crawlers from the grass when we could scoop up a thousand minnows with one sweep? We calculated we would need two 50-gallon aquariums.

I put my arm up to my elbow in one of the buckets. It was all squirming flesh. “This is what a doctor must feel when he opens up someone’s belly and probes around for an appendix.”

“Yeah”, Dave agreed, “it feels just like life.”

What happened to our bait store?

We returned to the river many times to catch “shiners”. We never again caught more than a handful.

Gun Crazy

Microsoft Word 

by Robert Giles

When a bullet, for the second time, went right through the garage door, the boys decided to take the gun down to the river for further testing.

Chuck had built a successful crossbow and decided to convert it into a gun. I won’t give you a blueprint. All he needed was a bow string, a piece of spring steel, the end of a two-by-four, a narrow gauge iron pipe, and a short steel rod. And bullets. They were easy to get from one of our friends. There were a lot of sportsmen in our neighborhood.

Soon we were on the wall overlooking the Ohio River. It was about a third of a mile wide. On the other side was the Jones & Laughlin Steel Works.

Chuck held the gun “stock” to his shoulder, pulled back the bow string, secured it, and pressed the trigger. There was a tiny splash where the bullet struck the water, about a hundred yards off.

We took turns, everyone achieving the same result. It was pretty slick.

“Why don’t we find a target to shoot at?” someone asked. “It doesn’t take much skill to hit the river”.

We looked about for something to shoot at. Behind us was a railroad embankment. Across the tracks was the Ohio River Boulevard. There were no trees suitable for hanging a target.

“We better not risk it. We came down here to keep out of trouble.”

“Let’s just shoot up the rest of the bullets and go home. We can always go target shooting in Legionville Hollow.”

The box held about two dozen more bullets. We aimed a little higher to make it more interesting. What harm would it do to shoot up the Ohio River?

A booming voice came across the water –

“Please. Hold your fire. Do you want to kill someone?”

Evidently someone at Jones & Laughlin was using a bullhorn.

We didn’t have to be coaxed. We dropped the gun and the bullets in the weeds and lit out for home. Just as we got to the top of the stairs where the locktender’s quarters once were, we heard a police siren.

It was time to go underground. We went down into the basement of the ruined building and crouched out of sight.

We heard several sets of footsteps overhead. They trailed away in the direction of the river. About ten minutes later they were again overhead.

“You don’t think they’re hiding in these ruins, do you?”

“You want to go down there and find out?” One of the policemen was standing over the entrance hole. It looked like he would find it a tight fit. He didn’t want to risk it.

“They’re probably in the woods by now. Let’s head back.”

We tried to figure out what had gone wrong. “Do you think those bullets were skipping all the way across the water like a pebble on a pond?”

Some years later I was working at the J&L steel plant. An older worker and I were on the river bank. I pointed across to the old lock on the Legionville side. “That’s where we fished and played when we were kids – right over there.”

“Some knuckle-heads were shooting a gun from over there once. They probably didn’t know it but the bullets were flying all around here. We took cover. We were afraid to lift our heads. The shooting didn’t stop until the foreman got on his bullhorn. Crazy.”

He turned to me as though struck by a sudden insight. “That wasn’t you, was it?”

Beautiful River

Dredge and Barges in Ohio River, Beaver PA (Google Earth)

by Robert Giles

Sunova Beach

The big sign in the sand at Crows Island was perhaps the first thing we looked for when church let out. From where my Dad parked up on Dippold we could see it clearly – “Sunova Beach”.

Crows Island was opposite Baden near the Aliquippa shore. The channel on the Aliquippa side was narrow – maybe sixty feet wide. About 1964 or 1965, the LTV Steel Company filled in the channel and raised the height of the island about ten feet. That was the end of Crows Island. LTV built a new steel mill on top of it.

Before that, it was just a long, flat sandy dune. I don’t remember there being any trees – maybe a few scrubby ones. There was some Joe-Pye weed, sumac, and cattail. The island was uninhabited. There was a makeshift shed on “Sunova Beach” that served as a dressing room for bathers.

From the Methodist Church, the beach beckoned. There was about forty feet of clean white sand down to river’s edge. The beach was maybe fifty yards long. Frequently we would see one or two motor boats anchored and sun worshipers on towels or chaise lounges.

I don’t remember when we hatched our plan but it might have been during a ride home from church.

My brother Chuck and his friend Larry found an article in a magazine showing how to make a raft with lumber and Clorox bottles. The “bottles” were actually plastic gallon jugs.  The idea was to make a deck from light lumber and then string the Clorox bottles beneath and along the sides. The bottles would provide enough buoyancy to float the deck and two passengers.

We calculated we would need about thirty Clorox bottles with caps. The guy who wrote the magazine article must have done a lot of laundry.

Not just any empty bottle would do – we had to have the caps too. Even if we got the whole neighborhood involved, it would take all summer to collect enough. After some deliberation, we decided to relax our standards. Any large plastic jug would do even if it didn’t bear the Clorox logo.

I think it was about then that soda pop started coming out in liter jugs. We knew that a liter was smaller than a gallon, but OK, what the hey – 2 soda pop bottles were roughly equal to a Clorox jug.

By late July we had collected the required flotation devices – what would we do for lumber?

There was a truck park on Duss Avenue next to Jan’s Bar. There were wooden skids lying about. No one would miss one.

“This is awfully heavy. It’s water-logged from being out in the rain. Weren't we supposed to use light lumber?”

Free lumber was too good to pass up. Besides it was already nailed together into a deck of sorts.

Hauling the heavy skid with bottles attached all the way to the river was impossible.  We decided to take the component parts there separately and construct the raft on the river bank.

We took turns carrying the skid across Byers’ Field and down over Route 65 and across the Pennsy tracks. Additional hands were needed to drag the bottles. Trailing clouds of Clorox jugs, we must have made quite an impression on passing motorists. Some demonstrated their appreciation by honking their horns.

There were seven of us. The raft was designed for two. Our friend Alex contributed two truck tire inner tubes. Another kid had a life preserver from his uncle’s rowboat. We all planned to sail.

Finally we were at the launch point – the mouth of Legionville Run. We attached the large bottles to the bottom of the skid and tied the liter bottles around the rim, all according to specification. Everything was secured with plastic clothes line.

We were ready to launch. Chuck and Larry stepped onto the raft. They were in about three feet of water. Almost immediately, the raft began to sink, not all the way to the bottom, but below the surface.

Maybe the lumber was just too water-logged from lying out in the truck park.

We could see that our vessel was not sea-worthy. What to do? We still wanted to get to Sunova Beach.

My brother, as usual, had a plan. Why don’t we just tie the Clorox bottles around our chests and float over that way. Who needs a raft?

“You guys who were going to share a truck tube can use bottles too. That way we’ll all have our own individual floats.”

Chuck tested his Clorox bottle “vest” in the shallow water at the mouth of the run.  It worked.  Decked out in Clorox bottles and perched grandly atop truck tubes, we kicked and floated all the way to Crows Island, about a half mile down river.

Behind us, the abandoned skid bobbed ignominiously in the waters off Legionville Run.

We sailed all the way down the back channel and around the north end of the island and back upriver to Sunova Beach.

Sunova Beach looked a heck of a lot better from the Methodist Church than it did close up.

We landed briefly, but by then we were so tired and dirty and sunburned that we just wanted to go home. We headed straight across to Baden and walked the railroad tracks back to Byersdale, minus the bottles. We left them tied to the base of a willow tree.

Who knows -- the evidence of our grand voyage may still be there today on the Baden shore.  Islands and steel mills may come and go but Clorox bottles are forever. 

It makes me want to holler "Sunova Bleach!"

The Swimmer

It was a regular thing for the old guy to pull over by the railroad tracks and come down to the river to swim.

Sometimes we wouldn’t see him dive in - we would just hear his body hit the water. Other times we would see him pause atop the flight of concrete steps that led up to the ruins of the old lockmaster’s quarters, surveying the river as though looking for approaching traffic. Or we would see him down on the lock wall, taking off his clothes.

He wasn’t old “old”. He might have been in his fifties. His crew cut was thin and white around the ears. The hair on his chest and legs was also white. Over all, he was red and brown, with tinges of white.  He wasn’t what I would call overweight. He might have played football in high school.

If he worked in a mill, I would guess foreman. If he ever hung out in a bar, it was because he owned it.

He was always fifty yards away. He never came down to say hello or ask how the fishing was. Sometimes he would nod in our direction if we waved.

He always came to the surface about thirty yards from the river wall, facing backwards toward shore, treading water smoothly, showing only his head. He swam like a seal or other sea creature, effortlessly. When he finished his backstroke, he went into a breaststroke that was just as slow and regular. His arms and legs never cut the water. We just saw the back of his head, moving slowly away. He swam so noiselessly there were probably times when he came and went and we didn’t even notice he was there.

If a tug came along, he would bide his time until boat and barges passed, bobbing in their wake when his route was clear. For a second he would disappear entirely behind a wave, then reappear and disappear at regular intervals until the river calmed.

Calm – that’s the word I would use to describe the swimmer.  It might take him twenty minutes to get to his destination and twenty minutes to get back to shore. No wasted energy.

I don’t think I ever saw him swim all the way over to the western shore – he just went three-quarters of the way over and back. Forty minutes – I guess that was the goal he had set for himself.

On a really hot day when the fish weren’t biting we would be tempted to jump in ourselves. But the water was oily. There was always something scuzzy floating on it. Besides, it was over our heads. What if we swam out too far and couldn’t get back?

I liked to swim but I was a noisy, nervous, splashy swimmer. I couldn’t go the distance. I was almost in high school before I swam all the way out to the diving platform at Brady’s Run Lake or tubed over to Crows Island.

I still think of the old guy. He knew what he wanted to do and did it, patiently and masterfully. He didn’t seem to need people – at least he didn’t go out of his way to be social. He didn’t mind solitude. He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking - he just went in head first. Once he was in the water, he didn’t waste any motion.

Incredibly, he always seemed to climb out of the water as clean as when he went in – but who could be sure? He was always fifty yards away. 

Out on Teeter-Totter

The first time I went down to the old lock wall I was seven or eight. My oldest brother Jim took me. He showed me where the high school boys had carved their names into the stone.

The wall stretched from a point close to the mouth of Legionville Run all the way to Teeter-Totter, a distance of about 200 yards. The wall was partly submerged, even in those days. The north end near Legionville Run was under water. If you took off your shoes and socks and rolled up your pants you could walk the wall, even though it was under water. It was a foot or two beneath the surface. You had to walk a straight line or you might step into deep water.

The wall emerged about 30 yards before you got to the first “lock”.

There were two “locks” along the wall. The first “lock” was the more northerly of the two. We called them “locks” but now I’m pretty sure that is incorrect – thus the quotation marks. There were perhaps two locks around the dam that crossed the Ohio until 1924, but they were on opposite sides of the river, one for northbound vessels and one for southbound.

Our two “locks” on the Legionville side were actually mechanical gates that controlled the water level in the one lock on our side of the river. Remnants of metal plate were all that remained of the gates.

A person looking across the Ohio could see on the Aliquippa shore the twin of the wall on the Legionville side. The two walls were all that were left of the dam that once spanned the river.

Why was the dam destroyed and replaced by a new one at Emsworth (Dasheilds Dam)?

The dam at Legionville stood at one of the busiest stretches of the river, athwart the miles-long J&L steel works.

A fleet of barges and tugs hauled minerals from one end of the steel works to the other. Every relatively short trip back and forth required a passage through the locks. The consensus was that this was too costly. Time is money.

The US Army Corps of Engineers was nothing if not accommodating. They fixed J&L’s problem and left behind an interesting ruin for our fun and wonderment.

The two sites on the Legionville side that we referred to as “locks” were good places to fish. Some boys liked to swim there. Once in a while someone drowned.

What I wanted to describe to you before I got sidetracked into all this lock business was the southerly portion of the wall (the Ambridge end). Just south of what we erroneously referred to as “the second lock” was the area we called “Teeter-Totter”.

Teeter-Totter referred to the southern-most tip of the wall. There was water on three sides of Teeter-Totter. Think of it as a man-made peninsula of crumbling concrete.

My brother helped me navigate out to Teeter-Totter on that first visit. Right off the bat I could see that the path was blocked by a small willow tree. Jim showed me how to grab a bunch of willow and lean out over the river while sidestepping along the first few feet of wall. Once past the willow, I could see that the wall was overgrown with poison ivy. Fortunately the ivy and the earthen bank on the left side quickly gave way to a back-water. There was water on both sides of the wall from there on out. On the right was the deep water of the river, on the left was the muddy shallow water of the inlet.

According to legend there were “golden” carp that inhabited the inlet. All I could see was refuse of every kind, floating on the slack water. In fact, everything that floated seemed to end up in the inlet – wiffle balls, soccer balls, beach balls, baseballs, softballs, rubber balls, wiffle ball bats, lumber, baby dolls, hula hoops, Christmas ornaments, artificial Christmas trees, plastic bottles, toilet floats, and bars of ivory soap.

The water was oily and shimmered with the rainbow colors you see on asphalt after a rain. The air smelled like heavy machinery.

All we had to do was turn ever so slightly to our right and there it was – the beautiful Ohio. Did you ever see a large body of water in motion that wasn’t beautiful?

The sun was descending and imparted a golden glow. You had to shade your eyes with your palm to look at it. Across the river was the J&L tin mill and seamless tube.

Everything looked fixed and permanent. A locomotive puffed along the track. A coal barge was unloading way up river where you could just make out the Ambridge-Woodlawn Bridge.

We stepped a little farther along the wall.

“Careful, Bobby, this is where it gets interesting.”

The concrete under my feet began to shift. Way out there on the point, the wall took a beating. The river was tamed but still had wild moments even the Corps of Engineers couldn’t manage.

The blocks on the surface of Teeter-Totter were slightly askew but still had a solid look. It was the more friable blocks below in the river that were eroded and unstable.

Did you ever walk up a seesaw and get to the tipping point and keep going and let the board pitch you forward to the other side? If you were agile or at least prepared, you could keep your footing. The unsure and unaware landed in the grass. Scaredy-cats backed off to contemplate careers as playground supervisors.

“OK, Bobby, when the wall shifts, just step forward onto the next block. You won’t fall in, I promise.”